Niranjan N V, has around 17 years of professional experience and 4 years as a Consultant, Coach and Training in Agile-Scrum, Lean- Agile, XP,Kanban, Software Estimation, Project Management . He has extensive implementation experience in Agile –Scrum, FP Based Productivity Designing and deployments, CMMI and SQA Processes etc.

Key Accomplishments during Professional Experience:

During his professional experience, he has implemented Agile and Traditional projects, designed and conducted several trainings in Symphony University and anchored many process trainings. He played key role in Philips to reach CMM Level 5 while he was a Quality Head for Philips Health Care division.

He has published and presented papers on Software Size, Software Project Risks Management in International Conferences such as SEPG, 18th World Congress for Quality and also been invited as guest speaker in IIM, Bangalore, Yahoo Software. He has been a panel speaker and moderator for Agile Best Practices Sessions through Bangalore SPIN. He has also delivered talks in conferences and webinars in Tech Gig, Times of India on topics related to Agile Methodologies.

2) He has been a Cconsulted IT organisations and Trained nearly 1750 professionals in Agile.

3) He is one of the Core Committee Members for Bengaluru Chapter Agile Leadership Network.

4) He has Trained more than 1750 participants since 4 years, to various IT Companies in the areas of Agile Methodologies (Scrum Project Management), Agile Estimation and Planning, Agile Requirements Analysis, Software Estimation Techniques(Function Point Analysis, Use Case Point Estimation etc), to various clients in Bangalore, Kolkota, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad ,Mohali and Mumbai and also to International Clients in USA.

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Agile leadership i is the ability of a leader to be able to lead well in a wide range of circumstances especially new, changing and ambiguous situations. In situational leadership theory, styles of leadershiprefer to behaviours that a leader should engage within different situations. Agile leader

Operates effectively amid uncertainty, complexity and rapid change

is knowledgeable about Agile values, approaches and practices

Aligns and empowers team toward delivering more customer value

Personally integrates feedback and experiments, and adapts their ways

Catalizes change in others and facilitates organisational change

The proposed talks explain the behaviour, leadership styles and actions of Agile leaders. They have to be great at the following areas, to play their role effectively in 21st century.

Agile Leaders

#1 - Incubate the Transformational leadership

# 2 - Develop the Transformational Leadership

# 3 - Expand as a leader from Expert-Achiever-Catalyst

#4 - Develop people

# 5 - Lead the change

# 6 - Set the goal and minimise the work requirements

# 7 - Unlock the best potential

The talk is purely is based on learning and observations as part of my coaching, training experience and leadership style required in 21st century.

schedule 2 years ago

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45 Mins

Experience Report

Advanced

My talk is about how the leadership can play their role when we talk about the Software Enterprise Agility. As per Peter Drucker a well known management guru, “Workers themselves are best placed to make decisions about how to perform their work”. To effectively lead, the workers must be heard and respected. They have to have autonomy. Continuing innovation has to be part of their work, the task, and the responsibility of knowledge workers. When we talk about Scaling Leadership style for enterprise agility, The leadership should be ,

My talk will initially consist of current challenges in the Leadership based on my experience in coaching, consulting and training

When we talk about the scaling leadership for Enterprise Agility, the most desired style is “Leaders should be developer of people”. Lean-Agile Leaders are lifelong learners and should help teams build better software systems through understanding and exhibiting the values, principles and practices of Lean, Systems Thinking, and Agile development

The main part of the talk is based on my experience of coaching, training and consulting. The Lean Agile Leaders for Enterprise Agility should

Have a Systems View:

That means today’s Lean-Agile Leaders should understand the economics, the full value chain, and the Cost of Delay, Optimize the whole, not the parts, the organization & software system. They should focus more on implementing Lean Budgeting rather than traditional project based budgeting.

Implement the Product Development Flow:

Lean agile leaders should know how to visualize work; expose bottlenecks, Reduce queues and backlogs. In Enterprise Agility , bigger the size of people, it will lead to more coordination issues, complexity increases, alignment to the business units . Implementing organization strategic goals becomes difficult and pose multiple challenges. Therefore we need to think of Reduce batch size, accelerate feedback, exploit variability using cadence and synchronization so that every team demonstrates value to the customers

Embrace the Agile values and principles:

In an Enterprise Agility, Lean Agile leaders should fully understand agile values and principles; such as focusing more on deliver more frequently and know how to implement XP, Scrum, Kanban more importantly Scaled Agile Methods such as SAFe, LeSS etc. Exhibit Kaizen mind and empower high-performing, cross-functional teams.

Strengthen the hidden potential and intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

The lean agile leaders should focus more building a learning organization and emphasize lifelong learning. They should provide safe environment of mutual influence the teams and who ever work under them. They should foster decentralized decision-making with minimum specific work requirements. One of the ways of unlocking the hidden potential and motivation of the workers is ensuring the direct reports and team members have

Mr.Agile Leader - “ Develop People or Solutions”

schedule 3 years ago

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20 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Based on my experience of coaching/ training agile teams for 5 years, one of the important reasons for agile teams are impacted, is the personal leadership style of Agile Leaders(Scrum Master, Senior Managers etc) . I have summarized following, factors or impediments for creating effective agile teams

Often Agile leaders focus more on “delivering solutions” than “developing people”.

Agile leader need not specify work requirements, all that team needs is - empowerment, autonomy to work.

The agile team needs more support through mentoring, coaching from agile leaders to exhibit the culture “Being Agile” than “Doing Agile”.

Agile leaders need not be an Expert to coach agile teams.

Agile teams needs to be taught on Identifying Problem, Problem solving skills and corrective actions and demonstrate steady, small and continuous improvement.

My inspiration to write here, is derived from the book “ Managing Excellence”by David Bradford and Allan Cohen, and reading blogs, articles along with my own experience.

The entire presentation will be done in “Pecha Kucha Style” with less words and more background pictures, in each slide. The most of the message is conveyed through pictures. The presenter will talk maximum 30 secs on each slide. The slides keep changing automatically after 30 secs, so that presenter continues the discussion in the next slide automatically

Am I really Agile - Maturity Model for Agile projects

schedule 4 years ago

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20 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Usage of Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Scrum-XP, FDD, Crystal and methodologies has become increasingly large in IT Industry and also non IT industries. As the usage of agile methods becoming wide spread, the effectiveness of implementation of these agile practices in projects, organizations become more important for success of agile. Agile manifesto and 12 agile principles, acts as guiding principles and helps in the agile deployment. But when it comes to operational daily tasks, there is no method to ensure whether agile projects implement 4 values of manifesto. For traditional methods of software development we have standards such as CMMI,ISO etc. This paper makes an attempt to defining Maturity Model for agile projects.

Following maturity model has been defined after our experience in consulting and training agile methods.

Level

Categorized by

Guidelines for Description

Maturity Rating based on Focus Areas

1

Basic

1) Following traditional Water fall approach for delivery. 2) Agile practices used in pockets. 3) Requirements/Features (Product backlog items) are more at high-level or Epics levels

Any Focus area <= 50%. Overall Compliance <=50%

2

Managed

1) Product backlog items are broken from EPICs into development user stories, product back log grooming is done 2) Basic metrics used and not very strong in prediction of the current performance, timeliness of deliverables 3) The Agile team delivers business value occasionally

All Focus Areas - 50% and 75%. Over-all compliance- 50-75%

3

Matured

1) Iteration Status , Agile Metrics in place using Agile Tasks Board 2) Usage of historic data such as velocity, story points committed v/s delivered for forecasting and estimation 3) Team reports the Iteration Effectiveness, Release Effectiveness to different levels of management like functional manager, Product Owner and Top management. 4) Team is skillfully using the Agile Engineering Practices in projects if not at Program Levels

All Focus Areas - >75% Overall compliance > 75%

To validate the maturity levels defined, an assessment of agile practices in projects are done and mapped into following focus areas.

Focus Areas

Development Practices/ Infrastructure

Iteration Planning/ Tracking

Product Ownership

Release Planning/ Tracking

Team Cohesiveness( Collaboration)

Agile Testing Practices

In order to rate the maturity levels for any project, the compliance of agile practices are mapped into above focus areas and Radar Chart is plotted to depict the compliance of each of these focus areas and are the agile mturity in projects.